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  • What Is Inquiry?

    Book Chapter |

    If students develop an understanding of how science inquiry is done and how it contributes to understanding the natural world, they will be better prepared to analyze and interpret information throughout their lives.…

  • Getting Started With Inquiry: Six Invitations

    Book Chapter |

    Student participation in inquiry serves two objectives—first, students discover that science is something more than merely learning what others already know—and second, students develop skills in interpreting data and…

  • An Invitation to Full Inquiry

    Book Chapter |

    In the full inquiry experience in this chapter, students will put skills of inquiry together as they think like scientists and apply critical-thinking skills to evaluate new information that they collect themselves. In…

  • Perspectives on Contemporary Controversial Topics in Biology Education

    Book Chapter |

    This chapter describes three different types of controversy and makes the case for including controversial topics in your course syllabus. It offers suggestions for handling these topics in a way that helps students…

  • How to Set Up and Manage Your Biology Classroom

    Book Chapter |

    There are a number of important practical aspects to setting up and managing a biology classroom. These include strategies for organizing students into groups, conducting laboratory work, maintaining live organisms in…

  • Forest History, Ecology, and Values

    Book Chapter |

    Forests have been crucial to human welfare since the dawn of civilization. The history of both the Old World and the New World contains many examples of civilizations that failed because they could not sustain their…

  • Principles of Forestry

    Book Chapter |

    The core value of forestry is the long-term sustainability of forests. Sustainability can be accomplished only if we understand ecological processes and respect them; then we can creatively protect and shape forests to…

  • Setting the Stage

    Book Chapter |

    Unquestionably, conducting successful field studies with high school or beginning college students is complicated, energy consuming, and challenging. Nonetheless, putting students in the field to collect real data,…

  • Vegetation Analysis

    Book Chapter |

    Mapping the structure of the vegetation in study plots is important for several reasons. First, with all the detailed data collected, students easily can lose perspective of the bigger picture; they can get lost in the…

  • The Abiotic and Biotic Forest Environment

    Book Chapter |

    The exercises in this chapter have a twofold purpose. First, they will characterize the abiotic environment (i.e., the microclimate created by the forest). It is important to realize that forests not only grow in…

  • Measuring Commercial Timber Values

    Book Chapter |

    This chapter outlines certain procedures used by foresters to measure the amount or volume of timber (primarily sawlogs) in a forest stand. This process is called timber inventory. Just as a storeowner keeps track of…

  • Recreation and Wildlife

    Book Chapter |

    In fiscal year 2007, there were more than 178.6 million visits to national forests across the United States; 86% of them were for recreational purposes! Forests of all kinds provide humans with a wide range of wildland…

  • After the Field Study

    Book Chapter |

    Students are out of the field and back into the classroom. In this chapter, students are provided with a Forestry Data Summary Sheet to help them focus on all the computations, sketches, charts, and data they need to…

  • Is It Possible to Turn Coal Into Diamonds?

    Book Chapter |

    How cool would it be to be Lois Lane? Anytime she wants a diamond, she just has Superman use his super strength to squeeze a lump of coal. But is this really possible? Using a high enough temperature and enough pressure…

  • Analogies: Powerful Teaching-Learning Tools

    Book Chapter |

    In this activity, teachers explore how teaching shares some attributes with a variety of other occupations, students consider their respective roles as learners, and both consider the reciprocal, interactive nature of…

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